Engaging Passers-by with Interactive Screens – A Marketing Perspective

Abstract: This position paper approaches pervasive advertising from a marketing perspective. It provides a short introduction into the shift from an economy of attention to an economy of engagement. In the second part it analyses seminal research on interactive screens and shows how passers-by can actively engage with public displays. 1 From attention to engagement For a long time, information was considered to be one of the most important resource of the information age but with the spread of digital technology, information is no longer a scarce commodity but became ubiquitous. As Richard A. Lanham puts it: "If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information age? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. " [1] Thus, for an advertising company, not the spread of information was the main difficulty, but the attention of their customers